4.7.1 getch

The procedure getch reads a single character from the terminal. But there are several subtle facts to consider. For example, if you don’t use the function cbreak!, curses will not read your input characters contiguously, but, will begin to read them only after RET has been pressed or after and EOF has been encountered. In order to avoid this, the cbreak! function must be used so that characters are immediately available to your program. Another widely used function is noecho!. As the name suggests, when this function is set (used), the characters that are keyed in by the user will not show up on the screen. The two functions cbreak! and noecho! are typical examples of key management.